No, you wanted your insurance company to be! Ding, ding, ding! Why do you suppose they wanted you to try physical therapy first???
LOL, the money insurance companies comes from the sky, right Joe? You paid for a policy, now they should throw money at you whenever you ask.
Yes, that is EXACTLY what it means. I paid for a policy through payroll deductions or labor.
That means I expect them to pay for whatever my doctor rules is expedient and the best course of treatment.
Wouldn't it be nice if the world worked that way?
But it doesn't. Insurance companies don't have unlimited cash. Neither does the government.
If you want the absolute best possible care, the only way to get it, is to pay for it yourself.
You don't have the money? Then you are at the mercy of the insurance company, or the government.
So which one is worse? Depends on perspective, I suppose.
The insurance company, it depends on the quality of the plan. The problem with company insurance plans, is that you don't really know how good the plan really is. The company can negotiate cut rate deals, with inclusions you have no idea about.
Or you can have a really good company, with a really good deal.
But ultimately, whatever is in those negotiated exclusions, you have to pay with out of pocket, and whatever is covered is covered.
Government on the other hand will give you nearly unlimited coverage and no exclusions.
But it's a lie. There are two ways government prevents you from getting health care, but both are less visible to the public.
The first way, is simply by denying treatment exists. In France, for example, they found doctors were required by the government, to not tell patients about treatments, that the government deemed to expensive to offer.
So while some patients had treatable conditions, they were never even allowed to know they existed.
Now tell me, would you have been so angry with your insurance company, if they had forced the doctor to sign a non-disclosure agreement about treatments they didn't cover?
Of course not. You would never have known. But in a free-market Capitalist system, you are allowed to know about everything that exists, even if you can't afford it. I know about the Bentley Phantom, even though I'll never own so much as a lug nut from one.
Yet either way, the result is the same. Your insurance didn't cover treatment X, and the people of France didn't even know treatment X existed. Neither paid for X, and neither got X.
The other way in which government limited expenses, is by simply delaying care. The insurance company denies a claim. Government delays the claim. Yes, you can get that treatment, absolutely, no problem, you got it...... Your name has been added to the list, we'll give you a call..... someday..... maybe.
The short flick A Short Course in Brain Surgery, by Stuart Browning, was about a guy in Canada who started having headaches and seizures. He was having them every single day. His local hospital said... we'll get you looked at in... oh 4 months. Instead he came to the US, and got it done within ONE day. He had a tumor. His local hospital said... ok that's important, we'll get in you in.... oh 4 months.
Now, unlike the Insurance company, the government does not do this intentionally. It's not a planned out thing.
Insurance companies have to make payroll, have to make a profit, have to pay bills and taxes, and all the things that an insurance company must do. So when they write up an insurance contract, they design that insurance contract to make a profit.
The government does not. That's true. If that is all you care about, then the government is better than insurance. But if you care about the results, the government ends up harming far more people, even if unintentional.
Government has limited funds. If they simply paid doctors and hospitals to do as many treatments as they can, the hospitals would do treatments until there was no money left, and then there would be a crisis.
To prevent that, the government must put limits on what the hospital can do. Rick Baker, the doctor who is filmed in the video mentioned above, says the reason he opened his private hospital was directly because he was turning away patients for lack of hospital bed at the Canadian hospital, even though they had an entire floor of empty hospital rooms. The rooms were "unfunded", meaning the government was not going to pay for them to be used.
Instead, patients were placed on the waiting list. Sound familiar? The VA system has just been caught doing the same thing. All government funded health care system operate this way. I would suggest to you, that is a worse system.